can't wait for winter to be over.

I think that my recurring health problems, which seem to happen most in the wintertime, might be caused by closing the windows and breathing indoor air pollution from whatever is in the house. It's not merely 'Seasonal Affective Disorder,' or winter depression - and yes, I do get a little bit of that. But it was late autumn this year when everything just collapsed, and it happens year after year. I feel great in the spring and summer when the windows are open, and more and more awful in the autumn as it gets cold enough to keep the windows closed all the time. And eventually, by midwinter, I'm totally incapacitated and can barely make it to work every day, much less do any projects that require thinking or effort.

I had an incident with my landlord where I went to work, on a warm day sometime last week (or whenever it was pretty warm recently) and left my windows open and the fan on. When I came home, I had a voicemail from the landlord saying that he had gone up to my apartment and closed the windows because 'the temperature was dropping drastically,' and he didn't want the pipes to freeze. It wasn't dropping all that drastically, and also, I would be home from work before late night, when it would get really cold. The pipes wouldn't even come close to having time to freeze. It was like 50 degrees outside.

If this was merely the landlord expressing his annoyance and being worried about the pipes freezing, it wouldn't bother me so much. But I get scared when things like that happen because I could get evicted if my landlord and I have too many conflicts over things like that. I did get evicted once in the past for a variety of reasons - long story.

It's almost March, and soon I'll be able to have the windows open more often. Right now, my friend gave me an air filter, and I'm using it and observing the results. I'm not sure yet. There's been some improvement in here but every time I've thought that, it's gotten bad again.

I just hate the fact that a predictable, recurring event - a seasonal change - is ruining my health and disrupting my life, year after year after year. I am really serious when I say that I wouldn't mind living in a primitive mud hut with straw bales or whatever for insulation. After sleeping in my car, I know it's possible to keep warm with enough layers.

I read something in my book and I laughed yesterday:

From Diana Leafe Christian, 'Creating A Life Together,' a book about how to build intentional communities. I can't say enough great things about those Diana Leafe Christian books and I'd recommend them to everybody who calls themselves an anarchist or a libertarian. If you think the government needs to be completely shut down, then somebody somewhere must be responsible for doing all of the 'services' that government is supposed to do. These books are about how to build an intentional community - a community where you yourself are directly responsible for community decisions about how people will get along with each other, who is responsible for community maintenance (without government, who will clean the sewers?), where does our money come from, etc. As an anarchist I must ask myself, if government didn't exist, then what would I myself do to take its place?

Well anyhow I laughed at the phrase 'Sustainabler Than Thou,' in a section of the book talking about negative attitudes that community founders can develop. People can get into major arguments over relatively trivial things seen as ecologically unsustainable. She didn't give any examples but I understood right away.

Another attitude problem: When we were starting our community, WE slept in tents for three years without heat or running water. It was talking about how community founders had hard times in the beginning before their community was stabilized, and so, when new members come in after the place is built, they haven't suffered as much as the original members, and don't know what they went through. I used to have to walk to school uphill both ways barefoot in the snow.

Anyway reading about that reminded me of sleeping in my car. I actually feel stronger because of it: it's a primitive wilderness survival skill. I know how to sleep in the car in cold weather. I used to actually be planning a phase where I would live out of my car, but I hadn't gotten around to that yet. I was going to put all my stuff into a U-Stor shed or something. It would be a way to save money I would have spent on rent. I actually almost feel like I could do it now. But cooking would be really hard to do. I don't want to eat fast food all the time.

intentional communities

I grew up in a 'community' and didn't even know it.

I'm reading 'Creating A Life Together' by Diana Leafe Christian. It's a book that thoroughly covers the details and the real-world things to do when you're starting an intentional community. It focuses on mostly sustainable ecosystem communities, although my own focus is what you might call 'sustainable economy' communities. It isn't so much the physical ecosystem, but the financial system that I'm interested in - what kind of money we use, and how we survive the recurring economic collapses as they gradually destroy the quality of life in the mainstream world over a period of decades.

Anyway, the book mentioned Homeowners Associations as one of the possible ways people can govern the community. I suddenly realized that when I lived in WV, my neighborhood was actually a private development with a Homeowners Association. The neighbors all knew each other, there was a relatively small number of houses, outside cars had no reason to drive up our dead-end road, and we sometimes did group activities together.

My mom noticed that things changed over time. In the beginning, we had gravel roads, and in the wintertime we would get trucks full of fly ash taken from local factories (or something, I forget where they got the fly ash) and put it on the roads to give traction on the ice. We would all do this together, riding in the back of the trucks and everyone shoveling fly ash onto the roads.

But we paved the roads, and eventually we no longer had those fly ash 'parties.'

We also used to have a picnic. But it was only once a year. And gradually, fewer people attended the picnics. They were busy with their own lives and didn't really feel that a yearly picnic was that important.

There were no other group activities except for the Homeowners Association meetings, but those weren't a 'fun' activity or a shared work activity, and the children didn't go to them. For a variety of reasons, the community gradually felt less and less like a community, and more like a bunch of random people who don't know each other very well - just like it feels out here in the 'outside world.' It wasn't just the fly ash parties and the picnics - there were lots of reasons.

Diana Leafe Christian talks about how shared activities and shared meals are the most basic things that make some place feel like a community - the more often you do those things, the more strongly you bond with the community. I loved going to the dining hall in college (even though it made me get fat) because I sat with the same group of people and saw familiar faces every day, at my relatively small college.

So during my adolescence I lived in a place where people trusted each other and knew each other, and I felt that it was a healthy place to grow up.

I recognized some of what Christian is writing about. She talks about how when the intentional community finally chooses a particular piece of real estate to live on, a lot of people almost inevitably break out of the group. When I think of the Free State Project in New Hampshire, I remember that in the beginning, they didn't know which state they would choose. When they finally chose New Hampshire, I felt disappointed, although I wasn't actually signed up for the project. I was hoping for someplace that I had visited and loved - I had been to Colorado once in middle school, and I loved the Rocky Mountains. So I was hoping for something out there. But since I wasn't even signed up, it didn't make much difference anyway. And now I've gotten used to it, and I don't mind that it's in New Hampshire. I've decided that you can potentially build a community in lots of places, not just one 'official' place.

I think that the New Hampshire Free State Project is still a good idea - it would be a good place for 'sustainable economies' to make intentional communities. Those communities would not directly connect with the FSP itself, but would simply go there because it would be overall a less hostile environment. Even if the FSP failed to get enough votes to make much change in New Hampshire, it would still be a place where people were more familiar with independent economies and the types of people who want that.

That is something that can be done even BEFORE the FSP becomes official. It can be done by individual initiative.